Comment by StopDisinfo910
16 hours ago
If you consider the complexity of running a whole grid out of intermittent sources of energy and the long term vulnerability of the logistic chain required to produce PVs, the long term costs and risks are not so clear cut.
For China which has the mineral it probably doesn’t make sense but for Europe, nuclear is a solid alternative especially when you consider that you can probably significantly extend the life time of the already existing power plants. Even if we ultimately transition to something else, it’s better than coal and gas in the meantime.
I am totally in agreement, that nuclear plants shouldn't be shut down before fossil ones.
A decentralized grid sound way more resilient, then one with a few nuclear plants, which often have long unexpected downtimes (see France). I agree with you on the potential logistical dependencies, however that sadly applies to nearly everything right now.
The French grid has been extremely resilient with only a minor setback a couple years ago when multiple plants were in maintenance at the same time and that’s despite not significantly investing in it for decades.
Technically, a grid based on nuclear production is also a distributed grid. You have multiple plants and it’s easy to add overcapacity to the grid because nuclear is easy to modulate.
This year again multiple nuclear plants in France had to reduce their output due to heatwaves and water levels, and ongoing cooling concerns. This is becoming a yearly occurrence. Though, I am not saying you can't have a nuclear grid, or you shouldn't use it at all, it's just that renewables seem to be a much better solution for most cases.
By definition the grid is decentralized. That’s what makes it a grid. Resiliency of the grid is a function of excess capacity but not the number of nodes.
I am no expert but remembering the grid outage in Spain this year, which was caused by a substation or node failure and not by a capacity problem. Wouldn't it be fair to describe resiliency as a combination of both capacity and nodes?
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